Design and Brand Reinforcement

Brand Reinforcement

I’ve seen conversations constantly come up about the designs we use at 1Hive and how to improve our decentralized brand management, better brand consistency, etc. And I couldn’t help but think of some possible solutions; both to calm the waters with the discussions and to up our design-game.

I think the first step to improving our Decentralized Brand Management in general, would be to start by reinforcing the design guidelines, trying to develop more assets for designers to use and being a bit more specific with the best practices so we can give the public the image that 1hive deserves.

Decentralization encourages free thinking and the use of creative solutions

That said, I want to make it clear that I do not intend to oppress or inhibit the creativity of others; these guidelines are not meant to be tremendously strict, but neither are they meant to be taken lightly.

Brand guidelines should be flexible enough for designers to be creative, but rigid enough to keep your brand easily recognizable. Consistency is key, especially if you need the brand to extend across multiple media platforms.

I’ve been talking with @borisblock about creating a Brand Guidelines Book, which would contain all the information needed to work in a simple way. As well as we would like to work on expanding the assets, giving the community and designers more material with which they can create quality content.

I would like to use this post to make a call to action to designers who want to potentially form a small temporary swarm to research and develop these assets for the use of the entire community.

And yeah, you may have thought that brand guidelines are only for designers, but they go far beyond that. An effective brand identity is beneficial for all users, they function as a resource that everyone within the DAO can use to better understand how to represent 1Hive.

Strong brand guidelines are more than a series of images with ticks and crosses to represent the dos and don’ts of the identity. They should allow the user to apply the brand successfully outside the rigorously constructed examples; they should let the user understand how to create a compelling piece of content to solve a problem.

The visual identity goes hand in hand with the vision and values of 1Hive, and we want to support it with design solutions that fit the personality of the DAO. That’s why we also want to empower users with a variety of assets so that anyone can feel comfortable and ready to create content, automatically connecting with who we are. By achieving that simple and friendly connection we bring 1Hive closer to a decentralized brand environment.

Brand Book Content (Guidelines)

  • An overview of 1Hive history, vision, personality and key values.
  • Iconography
  • Margin usage
  • Image style / photography
  • Typography: (font styles, sizes, and spacing)
  • Logo usage
  • Do’s and Dont’s
  • Voice and tone

*Great examples of Brand Guidelines: Uber, Red Cross

Celeste Integration

With the recent integration of Celeste to the 1Hive ecosystem, I’ve been thinking that it could be interesting that eventually these brand guidelines could be curated in Celeste, so that they can be changed over time with ease, reaching consensus among the community.

I think it is a unique solution, and it fits to have a more accurate decentralized brand management, I would like to know what the community thinks about it.

Social-Curation Channel

With the recent decrease in cred on the #design channel, I thought of a way to incentivize users to create valuable content and continue to design marketing solutions that we can use. I feel that the social curation channel can be used as an extra cred incentive for designers who submit designs that we end up using in our social media.

I feel there should be a fair balance of cred in the #design channel, not so high as to be abused, but not so low that people don’t feel motivated to contribute. It should be a middle ground where cred gamers/spammers don’t find it worth it. That’s why I want to encourage people to create content more in line with our identity, which will be rewarded with extra credit.

For that we would have to have a small team, who would be in charge of selecting the designs that will end up in social-curation. Precisely in this case, the Brand Guidelines will make our job easier, both for the content curators and the creators themselves.


Here are some links that may be helpful to better understand the subject:

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Having been in the middle of those discussions several times I’m particularly interested on how can we go about this.

As I have said a couple of times before, I’m absolutely against 1Hive paying for stuff and ending up without a proper and consistent image but seems like there’s a lot of people that want to take it on the light and creative side.

Hopefully something like this can mitigate the discussions and give a more unified picture even as a decentralized community.

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In particular, I think that the helm should be driven by someone who has knowledge of design, related careers or studies!

and teamwork is vital, in any project.

a clear example, there are people who are in charge of writing they could request or propose what they need for their post or publication in social curation

and put selfishness aside! We are all here for something, to contribute something and receive something in return and I think that the north would be to work together for 1hive!

Best regards!

Design is important work - I’d love to see a swarm come together to build and maintain this.

In particular, I think it would be helpful to have a bank of assets built in such a way that they can be reused across projects - which would provide leverage for new UX / front-ends for 1Hive dApps

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Interesting idea to use Celeste for positive affirmations of something rather than a challenge to something that violates the covenant. Is there a philosophical divergence here from it’s intended use? Is that bad? Could lead to more supply and turn Celeste from a purely judicial branch to a legislative one.

Hello Efra thanks for getting around to starting the thread around design and brand reinforcement.

I had originally started out something and thrown in pretty much every cool design i had found in design channel in a Notion document, take a look here and let me know if you guys want to continue on adding to these assets or if you are planning on making something new that’s similar.

If you are to create a Design swarm may it be just temporary, id like to see the following two outcomes.

  1. Create easy to follow brand guideline for all artists. This guideline or handbook would include details on how artists can also add to the guide line and modify it

  2. How these guidelines or handbook get incorporated within our ecosystem? Will it be easy for non designers or people not educated with the guidelines to distinguish if the requirements are met? Ex. for social curation we can distinguish that something has been approved by the community via the blue check mark.

I really like that you are incorporating the social curation within this posts as i feel its very under utilized by designers and we need to create a synergetic approach between writers and designers to make amazing custom content coming out from 1Hive.

On that note i have double checked with @befitsandpiper about how the distribution of pollen works in terms of tagging someone within that post and here are the results(not including not tagging anyone);

Scenario 1. User posts with a tagged person within the post they split the reward 50-50
Ex. Bob: Tweet from 1Hive with “@jimS” design = 50 / 50 split

Scenario 2. User posts with multiple tagged users within the post the reward split is 50% for the poster and 50% divided equally for the rest.
Ex. Bob: Tweet from 1Hive with “@jim” design and “@linda” witty clickbait title = 50% for Bob, 25% for Jim, 25% for Linda

So I would like to invite both designers and writers to work together to create awesome content and be rewarded for your efforts even further then the satisfaction of being part of 1Hive :honeybee:

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Hey D0SH, thanks so much for taking the time to respond. :smile:

I recognize many of the designs you collected in that Notion, they look very good to me, we could take some of them, and others would have to be redesigned to fit a more accurate / consistent image as possible, so they could be added to the brand book.

Our goal is to do something similar, but I’m totally willing to use assets already created (thats the idea), my goal is not to erase anything, but to expand and improve what we already have. Even so my vision about assets is much broader, I plan to add many more resources for everyone (backgrounds, iconography, even some sound fx for videos).

Honestly, thinking about it, temporary swarm is fine for this specific big job (Brand Reinforcement). But in my opinion I think it would be beneficial to have a Design Swarm, which would be in charge of fulfilling specific requests from other swarms (it could be connected with Terra, Buzz, and so on…).

In fact I think it could be interesting to have a Design Bounty Board that would be managed by the leading members of the design swarm and even a member of Buzz, that make sure to make a correct QA to the submissions. It would be a way of delegating a bit of Buzz’s work, and making sure that each swarm receives content previously approved by our design team.

And for the smaller and spontaneous contributions we can use the mechanism you mentioned to collaborate in social-curation. I would love to see us join forces, both writers and designers, to create efficient marketing solutions. :grin:

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the best thing is to create a design contest and pay with xdai, that motivates anyone and you can choose from many designs, plus it makes a very good publicity of the network.

Thanks @Efra for taking time to point out potential solutions for the current situation around 1Hive brand management and design contributors :man_artist: :woman_artist:
I think that the subject is very important and i agree that with improved guidelines and proper motivation for contributors we can produce more quality content. Plus, a dedicated swarm can add something that is very needed - curation for designers and a link for better collaboration between other swarms, such as buzz swarm that often needs some fresh design work for marketing :mega:

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I totally agree with this idea of ​​creating such a swarm, in particular I am sure that many designers want to contribute something of quality to 1hive! :honeybee:

create useful resources, depends on a team, what I mean by this two people with knowledge and management of the area like you @Efra and @borisblock ould command the helm of the ship!

For designers to make quality content there could be one person per swarm who requests something they require, be it a graphic piece, design or something!

I think that teamwork is vital, and not just dedicater indefinitely to say that it is good or that it is not good, as many users have recently done in the #design :art: channel.

We all have a goal and it is to contribute in 1hive, the metaphor is because if we all work on the same axis far from criticizing the work why we do not guide it in the correct way!

I don’t think a contest is what it takes to handle the design theme of 1hive in general!

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I think the idea of creating a Brand Guidelines Books is awesome! as you said it helps to decentralize but it gives the tools to have consistency with all the designs.
It’s something I have been thinking that we need but always something more urgent came up. Apologies for not being more helpful.
I don’t want to make the same mistake with all the Gardens branding, so I’m working now with the brand book.

Great initiative :grinning: let me know if I can help you in some way or if you have any questions or anything, I’m happy to help!

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Great thread! thanks @Efra
Super interesting ideas, i think we should schedule some kind of call regarding this specific topic to help reach a consensus faster. i think the brand and design boost is a key topic and we should be starting to move forward as soon as possible.

by the way, is anyone working here in a new banner for honeyswap twitter? If not, i think know someone who might be up for the task

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Thank You Fiore!, im so glad to have you on my team, any help is appreciated.

Hey Rod, I am actually working on a new document explaining the basics of a possible Design Swarm, as well as the content that will have the new Brand Guidelines Book included.

After this document is ready, we will be planning a call / meeting to collect feedback from the community, and improve the aspects that still need to be polished.

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Thanks for working on this everybody! It is very helpful. I would like to learn some tips about how to use the branded items in publications. Basically a “How to use 1hive branded materials for dummies”

We have some writers who can benefit from this I believe. So producing a brand book would be helpful to us writers. I am not familiar enough with 1hive swarm dynamics to have an opinion about creating a design swarm.

I think our social curation channel has been doing very well. Lots of collaborations starting to appear. Thanks to Solar, Harsh and T.Wells. Good inspiring stuff.

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Hey, I know it’s been a while since I last appeared here, this hiatus has been due to personal reasons, you know, these things in life that sometimes go out of our control. But anyway, after re-evaluating everything that has happened and examining my priorities, I want to let you know that I am back, and this time to stay.

I have not forgotten what I started. My intentions, ambitions and goals are still active, a few days ago I have resumed working on the brand book, which very soon I will be showing updates on how it is coming along. I’m slowly trying to focus while I get back on track, I can’t wait to rejoin and continue contributing to the community.

I have been reading the forum, looking at the posts, digesting the changes, catching up on this ever rapidly changing environment. I hope you understand and thank you all in advance for your patience. :smile:

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@Efra Good brother, you are back, and with new energy, whatever you need here, I am always aware of the great work you do for 1hive!

You are a great one of the greats, Greetings from Colombia and I hope everything is going well both in your life and in your family, 1hive is eager to see those changes!

In particular those that we dedicate ourselves to design, it is like when a new season premieres and you look forward to this! :stuck_out_tongue_closed_eyes: